Ecommerce is regarded as the sales aspect of e-business. Ecommerce needs well executed e-tailing or virtual storefronts in order to facilitate access by consumers (e.g. users, shoppers, etc.) to online catalogs or product inventory. On-line or network access to a merchant's product inventory is typically done by consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the network (e.g. Internet) using a web browser. The manner in which the consumer is able to quickly navigate to their product/service of choice on the seller's website will dictate, to a large extent, the ability of the seller to execute the product/service sales transaction.
An online storefront can facilitate business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) online shopping, depending upon the targeted user of the online shop. With the growth of online shopping, comes a wealth of new market opportunities for stores that can appropriately cater to market demands and service requirements, however consumers still expect the ability to efficiently find online the products they are looking for amongst all of the various types and variations of products available. Like traditional physical stores, the ability of online stores to quickly and efficiently present consumers with consumer desired product selections and descriptions greatly enhances the online store's desired goal of converting consumer product interest into product sales.
One critical tool used by online shoppers to find a product of interest amongst the website of the retailer directly, or by searching among alternative vendors, is a shopping search engine interface. Only once a particular product has been found and selected on the website of the seller, can the consumer use a shopping cart to accumulate multiple items and to adjust quantities, with an associated “checkout” process. The access to and execution of the search engine by the online shop needs to handle the effects of information load, or overload, as the product information environment presented to the user via the search engine can provide additional product information such as comparative products and services, as well as various alternatives and attributes of each alternative (e.g. variants). This product information presented to the user by the search engine must describe products for sale with text, photos, and multimedia files that are considered relevant to the consumer in response to their product search query, otherwise the user may quickly lose interest in the online shop and may gravitate to another online shop with a better executed product information presentation experience. The online store must make sure that it's easy for the purchaser to get the product information they're likely to want in response to their search queries, rather than purchaser deemed irrelevant, useless or wrong information. Accordingly, the online shopping experience (and return online experience) of the user, as facilitated via the browser through the website search engine, should provide the consumer with access to product information and merchant information (e.g. shipping, store location, etc.) that is perceived by the consumer as ease of use and presence of user-friendly features.
Further, research has shown that many consumers will not buy from websites that they do not trust. What's more, site aesthetics, i.e. how good the web store looks, ease of desired product identification, and/or ease of site navigation, can be the most important factor(s) contributing to how shoppers judge the merchant's professionalism and trustworthiness. A disadvantage with current eCommerce websites is the presentation via inefficiently configured search engine interfaces that return endless pages of product grids containing product items that are mostly irrelevant to the consumer search. Consumers desire a search engine configured with a means to sort and filter category pages and search results in order to return relevant search results to a consumers' search/navigation query submitted to the search engine, as well as providing ease of access to purchase those products desired by the consumer.